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The 411 on 311? Don't dial 911 - it's still breathing

Back in 2003, Toronto residents were told they'd be getting a brand new municipal information hotline: Call 311 for answers to questions about garbage pickup or your nearest public pool.

By John SpearsVanessa LuCity Hall Bureau

Wed., June 4, 2008

Back in 2003, Toronto residents were told they'd be getting a brand new municipal information hotline: Call 311 for answers to questions about garbage pickup or your nearest public pool.

Five years later, the service is still on hold, thanks to, as one councillor put it, a combination of bureaucratic and political stumbles.

The long-awaited service really is just over the horizon, says Councillor Peter Milczyn, who's piloting the project championed by Mayor David Miller in 2003.

Next year, he vows, you'll be able to call 311 to report a broken street light, ask when you can go skating at a city rink, or find out where to apply for a building permit. (Though just yesterday, a staff report edged the launch date back from early 2009 to June 2009.)

Head to Halton Region, however, and you'll find residents have been able to call 311 since March, just three years after striking a committee to get the hotline.

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"The public really appreciates the simplicity," says Kate Johnston, manager of customer service improvement. "In Halton, we have two levels of government, so it means customers don't have to figure out who delivers what services."

Halton's system – first proposed in 2005 – is also more complex than Toronto's in that it handles calls for the public and Catholic school boards, as well as local and regional governments.

It seems simplicity has not been the hallmark of Toronto's 311 experience.

When Miller first campaigned for mayor in 2003, he called for a 311 system so residents could use the same number to ask about anything from garbage pickup to SARS.

"People don't have a simple number, and they should," said Miller, who said in his 2003 inaugural speech that it would be launched in 2005. A July 2004 staff report also promised the service for the "summer of 2005."

In 2006, during his second mayoral campaign, Miller repeated the pledge for "a 311 hotline so that every resident has direct and simple access to a person at City Hall who can help resolve problems."

"It has taken too long," Milczyn acknowledged, in what's becoming a familiar refrain among Torontonians who complain that red tape stalls too many good ideas in the city. (Another example surfaced last week, when a year-old plan to put a few food carts on the streets to offer something other than hotdogs got put off for yet another year.)

At first, Milczyn says of the 311 plan, "senior staff didn't buy into it 100 per cent," so the project didn't get off to a flying start.

When a proposal finally came forward, council balked at the estimated $65 million cost, leading to further delays. The estimate was eventually whittled down to $28 million, to cover the needed hardware and software plus building renovations, training and other setup costs.

The figure has now crawled back up. A contract for the software to run the system is close to signing, at a $32 million cost.

While Halton's system has round-the-clock staffing for urgent matters, such as broken traffic lights or a public health emergency, callers are asked to call back between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. weekdays for non-urgent information.

The service got 1,014 calls in April, its first full month, with questions split evenly among the four local municipalities and Halton Region.

In Toronto, the 311 number will replace dozens of numbers now used to get city information. There's one number, for example, for city ice rinks, another for pools and a third for the island ferry service – even though all are run by the parks department.

The system will have a built-in accountability factor, says Milczyn. When reporting some problems – such as broken street lights or potholes – callers will be given a tracing number to track whether the problem gets fixed. Chicago already has such a system.

There is a central Access Toronto number – 416-338-0338 – which gets about 1,200 calls on a typical weekday. But in many cases, callers are simply referred to other numbers, sometimes winding up battling their way through complex menu lists.

The goal for 311 is that well-trained operators, backed by a comprehensive database of information, will be able to answer 70 per cent of questions. For questions they can't answer, callers should be transferred only once.

If an emergency call comes into the 311 system, operators will be trained to hand it over to 911, staying on the line until the emergency operator picks up the call.

It's anticipated that operators will handle about 100 calls per shift, but officials are still working on estimates of how many calls they'll field daily, and what times of day will be busiest.

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